This. I've played them all, except the Harry Potter ones, which I somehow missed, but need to get around to picking them up. I really just have a ton of fun with them. The games are cute and I always love the subject matter, plus I really love Legos. It's just an awesome combination.

Interesting. I tried the demos for first Indiana Jones and the Batmanís. They seemed amusing but werenít something I could see playing on my own and getting people to play local is very difficult. With online co-op I would be much more likely to play them.

This. I've played them all, except the Harry Potter ones, which I somehow missed, but need to get around to picking them up. I really just have a ton of fun with them. The games are cute and I always love the subject matter, plus I really love Legos. It's just an awesome combination.

The HP ones are my favorites so far, although the new LOTR may be overtaking them.

The game is set to land for current-gen consoles in North America next week too, while Europe will have to wait a little longer, until November 15th. The Xbox One version of the game will follow on November 22nd.

Meanwhile, TT Games has also revealed that LEGO Marvel Super Heroes will get more characters on top of the 100+ already available in the full game, with a day one 'Asgard Character Pack' that adds Malekith, Kurse, Hogun, Malekith, Volstagg, Odin, Fandral, Sif and Jane Foster to the already bulging roster of heroes. A price for the add-on has yet to be announced.

TLDR: I got a platinum trophy for this game! The Lego games are in desperate need of an overhaul if they're going to avoid the fate of Guitar Hero.

I just got a platinum trophy for the PS4 version of this game. It's my 10th platinum for Sony systems in total, though it's my first in a while, and my first for the PS4. It was mostly just an exercise in patience, though there were a few tricky parts that I believe never were intended to be that way.

Having gotten 100% in both Lego Marvel Super Heroes and Lego Lord of the Rings, I'm noticing a trend. If you only play through the story missions and nothing else, the games feel polished and solid on every count. If you start digging into the rest of the games however, which is arguably where the real meat of their content lies, you're going to uncover the less polished parts of the game. In fact, I'm starting to suspect that they don't really do QA testing on the open-world parts of these games, instead only doing a quick check to see that they are possible to complete. There are glitches and design problems that are so glaringly obvious, and which would be so straightforward to fix, that I get the distinct impression that nobody at the development studio ever actually tried to play these parts of the games.

In Lego Lord of the Rings, the standout poor design choice (by far not the only one, but the one that stands out as the most obviously untested) is the gold brick on top of Mount Doom. The path up there is so glitchy that you actually have to "cheat" by exploiting the game's control flaws to get past sections that are clearly bugged. For example, at the beginning of the section you're asked to climb a wall as Gollum. However, he'll randomly and inevitably jump off the wall for no reason whatsoever, sending you plummeting off the side of the mountain and requiring you to make the long trek back around to give it another try. Then you're asked to make precision jumps while the camera is locked at an angle that makes it impossible to see where you're supposed to land without trial and failure, with each failure sending you back down the mountainside. This kind of thing isn't unusual in the game, eventually sucking the fun out of collecting stuff.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes is the same, though there's thankfully no platform segment as poorly designed as Mount Doom. The standout here would have to be the air races. The flight controls are beyond ridiculous. You'd expect to be able to control pitch with the right stick, but noooo. That stick does nothing while flying. Instead you control pitch with the cross and circle buttons. They have no precision at all, so you're inevitably going to over- or undershoot your target through no fault of your own. Don't even think about tapping these buttons to gain more precision either. Double-tap the cross button and you'll gain a burst of speed that will fuck up any attempt at an air race. Double-tap circle and you'll plummet to the ground. Some of the air races ask you to do precision flight into tight spaces, such as tunnels. This could be cool if the game was designed to support such activities, but it isn't. As you enter these tight spaces you're most likely going to suddenly and automatically stop flying because the game decides that you obviously want to walk since you're flying so close to the ground. Get too far up and you'll crash into roof geometry, requiring you to carefully and painstakingly nudge yourself out without falling to the ground (you'll fail). Once again, this makes me think the designers never really tested these races, or that the only criteria for including them was that they "work". "Fun" was obviously never a key word when designing them, because absolutely none of the air races are fun in the slightest. Hell, I'd go so far as to say none of the races are fun, period.

Just to rub it all in, Deadpool makes a couple of special appearances at the end where he makes fun of these flaws, among others. It's supposed to be funny, but it comes off as the designers saying "haha, we know our game is broken, and we're going to point and laugh at you for suffering through the worst of it". His first such quest has Deadpool saying "you thought you were done with the races, eh? Nope, if you want to 100% this game, you're going to have to do one more". Then he's got a fetch quest where he starts off by complaining how boring fetch-quests are, then sends you off to collect a sword. You collect a duck, or something of that sort. Deadpool thanks you for getting it, and points out that you probably weren't even paying attention to what you were picking up, only following the waypoints. So... yeah. Even the designers know that these quests are dreadfully boring and done on autopilot. Why did they include them again?

In Deadpool's final quest, he admits that he's out of ideas, so "why don't we just beat up some bad guys for a while. Bonus points if you see them spawn". These quests are entirely pointless. There's no challenge, and the camera is so zoomed in and angled in such a way that you won't see most enemies until they're right next to you (hence the "if you see the spawn" thing). I found myself just using a ranged attack and firing randomly in all directions until these quests were over. It doesn't matter if you die or kill the NPC. You simply can't fail. Worst of all, Deadpool's quest shows that the designers know this. So why aren't they fixing these issues?

Add in about a dozen crashes (one even happened while saving the game. No save corruption though, luckily) and glitchy controls, collision-detection and camera movement, and it all starts to come apart at the seams.

The Lego games are in desperate need of a mechanics overhaul. The combat needs to be replaced entirely. They could cheap out and blatantly copy some other game, say the Batman games, and still come out way ahead of where they are now. The camera needs to be swifter, more zoomed out, and entirely under the player's control. Collision detection needs to be considerably improved. There needs to be stricter pathing during platforming sequences. I mean, why allow 3D movement when a quest takes place in a 2D plane and movement in the third direction will make you fail in a frustrating way? Flight needs to be scrapped and redesigned from scratch. Most importantly of all, every aspect of these games must be tested thoroughly, and the designers must be unafraid to ditch things that don't work. Because of these glitches, they're betraying their core audience (families) since the games sway randomly between insultingly easy and frustratingly and unintentionally hard.

If they keep churning out these games without any of these changes, they're going to push away their core audience. At some point people just go "I'd like to play more Lego games, but I just can't take that shit one more time". The upcoming Lego Hobbit game, released less than half a year after Lego Marvel Super Heroes, shows that the publisher is more concerned about quick cash flow than long term survival. Too bad. These games will suffer the fate of Guitar Hero very soon, which is a shame (just as it was for Guitar Hero). Hopefully they see the writing on the wall before it's too late.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed most of my time with the game. It's pretty mindless, and as long as I wasn't running into glitches or races, it was enjoyable enough. It's just not something I want to do over and over again in the future, in a new wrapper.

Yeah I don't play these games to 100%. Batman 2 we did about 75% and that's fine for me, ignore the stauff that is a pain and move on. However I agree the actual premise of the games is amazing but it does need something new, maybe the next gen will help with that.

I agree with Tilt's assessment. But I am enjoying Marvel, I think mostly because I don't play every single Lego game, so the formula isn't stale for me yet. The last one I played to completion was Batman 1 and Marvel is so much bigger in scope that I actually find it refreshing.

Logged

" And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason." Isaac Asimov

I personally am not enjoying Marvel as much as some previous ones. I rank the Harry Potter ones as the best of the series.

They actually have been tweaking the series pretty regularly. There are obviously some similarities in the combat and characterizations, but the open worldedness is a relatively new thing (Batman 2, Marvel and LOTR are the only ones I remember them in). It's actually been growing a little too open for these games, IMO. The Batman 2 world was relatively small, actually.

Making the games to free-roaming has diluted what works in the games which is the steady sense of exploration and checklisting. With Marvel, we're at a point where the discovery aspect of exploration doesn't really exist. And because the world is so big, the checklist doesn't feel like it gets ticked enough. What works in regular open world games, doesn't work for these.

Actually, it worked okay for LEGO City Undercover, which is another open world game that I forgot about. But I found myself locked into the story ending at one point and never felt the need to go back to it. It was a little cumbersome to get back to the missions again, too, much like it is in Marvel. This is a core element of these LEGO games, and it's just not served by this format.

The racing feels markedly worse in Marvel than I remember from other games, but the flying sucked using Superman in Batman 2, and they certainly didn't fix it (though that one had the 70s music, so it enhanced the awesomeness signficantly).

I got 100% Achievement completion in the 360 versions of Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4, and Lego Batman 2. I also finished the storyline, but did not finish all the collectibles in Lego Star Wars Complete because it was *crazy* huge, and the original Lego Batman because it was bad.

I've really been enjoying what I've played of Lego Marvel so far, but I'm only a few chapters in so I don't know if it's as good as the others.

It's disappointing that the PC version is single-player only. I've been wanting to play co-op with my fiance, but I've not been wanting to pay the extra $50 for another Dual Shock 4 plus the price of the game on PS4. On the PC I already have multiple 360 controllers and the game is much cheaper ($11.99 on Amazon right now!).